Very thoughtful and insightful post, thanks. I’m a big fan of Atlas Shrugged and have read it a few times, although the latest was many years ago. I agree with a lot of what you say here, especially about metaphysics and epistemology being fundamental.
However, I see the notion of the strike as a fantasy idea. Rand herself actually called it a “fantastic premise”. It was meant to dramatize the role of scientists, inventors and industrialists as heroes that society depends on. And it was conceived in the 1940s, when labor strikes were prominent in the news. Basically, instead of a labor strike, Rand asked, what if the thinkers went on strike?
In reality, the strike would never work, because the actual leaders of industrial society aren’t all implicit Objectivists, and can’t be convinced even in one of John Galt’s three-hour conversations. And worse, if it did work, I think it would be an utter disaster—society would collapse, and it would not be easy for the strikers to come back and pick up the pieces.
But none of that matters to me, because the novel isn’t meant as a practical plan for revolution, any more than Batmanis meant as a realistic model for fighting crime. The value of the book, to me, is the depiction of scientific/industrial achievement as a romantic, noble quest, and (as you note) the relationship of that to a certain way of facing reality and truth.
In reality, the strike would never work, because the actual leaders of industrial society aren’t all implicit Objectivists, and can’t be convinced even in one of John Galt’s three-hour conversations.
This doesn’t seem like an obstacle to me; in the story, there are plenty of ‘leaders of industrial society’ who stick around until the bitter end.
And worse, if it did work, I think it would be an utter disaster—society would collapse, and it would not be easy for the strikers to come back and pick up the pieces.
I do think Rand is pretty clear about this also, although I think she still undersells it. One of the basic arguments from Adam Smith is that specialization of labor is a huge productivity booster, and the size of the market determines how much specialization it could support. If you reduced the ‘market size’ of the Earth from roughly one billion participants to roughly one million participants, you should expect things to get way worse, and even more so if the market size shrinks to roughly one thousand participants. (Given the number of people who are mentioned working for the various named strikers, I think this is a better estimate for the number of the people in Galt’s Gulch than ten or a hundred, but she might have had a hundred in mind.) You can sort of get around this with imported capital, but then it’s a long and lonely road back up.
Time has also been very unkind to this; you’re not going to have a semiconductor industry with a thousand people, and I’m not sure about a million, either.
Very thoughtful and insightful post, thanks. I’m a big fan of Atlas Shrugged and have read it a few times, although the latest was many years ago. I agree with a lot of what you say here, especially about metaphysics and epistemology being fundamental.
However, I see the notion of the strike as a fantasy idea. Rand herself actually called it a “fantastic premise”. It was meant to dramatize the role of scientists, inventors and industrialists as heroes that society depends on. And it was conceived in the 1940s, when labor strikes were prominent in the news. Basically, instead of a labor strike, Rand asked, what if the thinkers went on strike?
In reality, the strike would never work, because the actual leaders of industrial society aren’t all implicit Objectivists, and can’t be convinced even in one of John Galt’s three-hour conversations. And worse, if it did work, I think it would be an utter disaster—society would collapse, and it would not be easy for the strikers to come back and pick up the pieces.
But none of that matters to me, because the novel isn’t meant as a practical plan for revolution, any more than Batman is meant as a realistic model for fighting crime. The value of the book, to me, is the depiction of scientific/industrial achievement as a romantic, noble quest, and (as you note) the relationship of that to a certain way of facing reality and truth.
This doesn’t seem like an obstacle to me; in the story, there are plenty of ‘leaders of industrial society’ who stick around until the bitter end.
I do think Rand is pretty clear about this also, although I think she still undersells it. One of the basic arguments from Adam Smith is that specialization of labor is a huge productivity booster, and the size of the market determines how much specialization it could support. If you reduced the ‘market size’ of the Earth from roughly one billion participants to roughly one million participants, you should expect things to get way worse, and even more so if the market size shrinks to roughly one thousand participants. (Given the number of people who are mentioned working for the various named strikers, I think this is a better estimate for the number of the people in Galt’s Gulch than ten or a hundred, but she might have had a hundred in mind.) You can sort of get around this with imported capital, but then it’s a long and lonely road back up.
Time has also been very unkind to this; you’re not going to have a semiconductor industry with a thousand people, and I’m not sure about a million, either.